EVALUATION OF A UBIQUITOUS LEARNING SYSTEM IN A DESIGN ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT

Ubiquitous computing is computing power that is integrated in devices and environments in such a way that they offer optimal support to human daily life activities. For industrial design engineering students, applying ubiquitous technologies offer a great opportunity and challenge for innovating everyday products. To teach the students about ubiquitous technologies and their application in design, we have done an exercise called "Innovate with ubiquitous technologies!" with more than 100 students in our Advanced Design Support-course. The exercise is threefold. The first task for the students is to find information on the Internet about ubiquitous technologies and to share the information found by writing about the collected information in an open content repository (WikID, our industrial design engineering wiki). In the second part of the practical exercise, the students have to create a concept for an incremental innovation of an existing product, and produce an abstract prototype of this concept. They are given a digital computer-aided design model of a product and they have to extend this product by applying a combination of ubiquitous technologies with the goal to improve an aspect such as new functionality, function and price trade off, performance, energy consumption, information richness, and/or user experience. In the third part the students have to make a cost calculation, comparing the product with and without the ubiquitous technologies. For this exercise a design infrastructure, and knowledge sharing sessions have been established including mobile blogs and group sessions and the students have been provided with extended creativity triggering techniques, a knowledge framework for ubiquitous technologies, and design tools. This paper reports on the way these ubiquitous learning applications have been received by the students, and on the results achieved. We present student design cases to illustrate how the exercise has been carried out and to present the students opinions on this ubiquitous learning exercise.